Prolog to: "Neuromorphic Electronic Circuits for Building Autonomous Cognitive Systems."

In the last decade, progress has been made in the construction of simple neuromorphic cognitive systems. These types of circuits are described in the paper, and they are compared to existing solutions. The limitations of such circuits are described, as well as design techniques for constructing larger brain-like systems. The technological building blocks are based on dynamic synapse circuits, hardware models of spiking neurons, and spike-based plasticity circuits, which are integrated into multichip spiking recurrent and winner-take-all neural networks, which can serve as models for pattern recognition, working memory, decision making, and state-dependent brain computing.